We’re very happy that we can make public some of the video recordings from the recent IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2020, held on Tuesday 13 October 2020.

Thanks to all who attended – we had over 200 registrations for the webinar.

The videos are embedded below or can be viewed directly on YouTube by following the link above the embedded video.

Introduction

Brendan Quinn, Managing Director of IPTC, opened the day with an introduction to IPTC and an overview of what was to come (10 minutes):

Michael Steidl, Photo Metadata WG lead on IPTC Photo Metadata

Michael Steidl presented on why we should care about photo metadata in his presentation “About IPTC Photo Metadata” (48 minutes including Q&A)

Google’s Licensable Images features

Francois Spies, a Product Manager for Google Images in Mountain View, presented on the Licensable Images features which they developed in consultation with IPTC this year.

After Francois’ presentation, Matthew O’Such, VP SEO for Getty Images and Marcin Czyzewski, CTO and Picturemaxx joined us to share their views on implementing the changes to IPTC Photo Metadata required to power the Google Licensable Images feature. Then we had a Q&A session including Michael, Francois, Matthew and Marcin.

Unfortunately, Google asked us not to make a recording of their presentation or the panel available. However the resources that Francois shared are all available via our Quick Guide to IPTC Photo Metadata and Google Images.

Andy Parsons on the Content Authenticity Initiative

Next up, Andy Parsons (Adobe) introduced the Content Authenticity Initiative (47 minutes including Q&A and a wrap-up of the day from Brendan Quinn):

Thanks again to all our speakers and panellists for their contributions. We’re already looking forward to next year’s event!

Currently next year’s IPTC Photo Metadata Conference is scheduled to be in late May 2021 in Mallorca, Spain in conjunction with the CEPIC Congress 2021. If that proves impractical then we will host another online event.

The Digital Media Licensing Association (DMLA) is holding its annual conference this week. IPTC and IPTC members have a strong presence – particularly IPTC’s Video Metadata Hub.

Mark Milstein of IPTC member Microstocksolutions joined in hosting the opening “virtual cocktail party” on Sunday 25 October. Mark is leading efforts to promote IPTC’s Video Metadata Hub at  DMLA, see his recent post on DMLA’s site.

Angela Weiss, a staff photographer with IPTC member Agence France-Presse, took part in a panel “Tales from the Trenches – True Stories from Working Photojournalists” on Monday. Then Mark Milstein was back on the “Hot Topics in Tech” panel along with Matthew O’Such of IPTC member Getty Images. Matthew also spoke on our panel at the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference two weeks ago.

On Tuesday, Andy Parsons of IPTC member Adobe is presenting a keynote on the Content Authenticity Initiative. Of course IPTC members already heard Andy speak at the Photo Metadata Conference, and at the Adobe MAX conference last week. Andy is very busy getting the word out!

On Wednesday, Mathieu Desoubeaux of new IPTC member IMATAG speaks on the “Image Protection – Creating a More Secure Ecosystem” panel.

On Thursday, Matthew O’Such of Getty Images is back along with Francois Spies of Google giving a reprise of his IPTC Photo Metadata Conference talk on the Google search “Licensable Images” features. Also on the panel is Roxana Stingu of Alamy, part of IPTC member PA Media.

Thursday afternoon, IPTC metadata gets a front-row seat at DMLA with the “Taming Video Metadata” panel, moderated by Mark Milstein of Microstocksolutions and featuring a presentation by Pam Fisher, IPTC individual member and lead of the IPTC Video Metadata Working Group. On the panel, Zach Bernstein of Storyblocks will be speaking about his implementation of IPTC’s Video Metadata Hub.

The conference also features panels on synthetic content, the legal aspects of the photo licensing industry, artificial intelligence and more.

Thanks to DMLA for putting together such an interesting event!

We had a great IPTC Member Meeting last week, our second online event. We’re getting used to online events now!

After introductions and a get-to-know-your-fellow-members session, Dave Compton of Refinitiv presented the NewsML-G2 Working Group‘s report. We didn’t have a new version of NewsML-G2 this time but we are doing work on making NewsML-G2 easier to understand and to use. We have been working on a NewsML-G2 Generator (soon to be launched), NewsML-G2 unit tests and a Python module. Some proposals for additions to NewsML-G2 were also discussed.

Brendan Quinn, IPTC Managing Director then hosted a re-introduction to semantic web technology: RDF, SPARQL, schema.org and how they relate to GraphQL, knowledge graphs and other buzzwords in 2020’s world of data. This proved to be a useful background and refresher for many of the following sessions over the next three days that touched upon semantic technology in almost every presentation!

Paul Kelly, individual member and group lead, presented the Sports Content Working Group‘s report highlighting the work that the group is pursuing on looking at a more semantically rich successor to SportsML.

Jennifer Parrucci of The New York Times presented the NewsCodes Working Group report. The focus since the last meeting was on a new batch of Media Topics terms, refreshing some labels and definitions, and adding more translations – we are now up to 11 languages in the Media Topics vocabulary! We have also updated the Genres vocabulary and launched the Trust Indicators CV.

Still on metadata and controlled vocabularies, we hosted a presentation and discussion session about Named Entities for News, including presentations by IPTC members Christoffer Krona from iMatrics, Jennifer Parrucci from The New York Times and Jeremy Tarling from BBC showing their organisations’ approach to managing metadata for named entities such as people, places and organisations. We had an interesting discussion about how IPTC can help the industry to move forward in managing named entities. Look out for more information from us soon!

On Tuesday, we started with Michael Steidl‘s Photo Metadata Working Group presentation, including a report on how the Google Licensable Images work has been received. Pam Fisher, lead of the Video Metadata Working Group then presented ongoing work towards a new user guide for video metadata, based on use cases and scenarios so we can make video metadata more approachable for people in different parts of the media industry.

Johan Lindgren of TT Nyhetsbyrån presented the work of the News in JSON Working Group, including discussions of work towards a ninjs 2.0, looking at how ninjs can map to binary serialisation formats such as Protocol Buffers and Avro, and support for machine-readable rights in ninjs documents.

The second half of Tuesday was filled by the IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2020 – see our separate news post about that event!

Wednesday morning was dedicated to important IPTC internal business, including the IPTC 2020 Annual General Meeting, where we re-elected the current board including Robert Schmidt-Nia of DATAGROUP as IPTC Chair. Linda Burman, individual member and Chair of the PR Committee, 

We also held the Autumn 2020 IPTC Standards Committee Meeting, chaired by Stéphane Guérillot of Agence France-Presse, where we discussed our ongoing project to “make IPTC standards more usable”. If you have any ideas about how we can make our work more usable or more accessible, please get in touch!

We ended the day with presentations from Laurent Le Meur of EDRLab, Steve Callanan of WireWax presenting their video analysis and manipulation tools, and Andy Read of the BBC speaking about their implementation of the GRID open source image management system.

IPTC members can find PDFs of all presentation files on the members-only event page.

The IPTC Autumn Meeting 2020 will take place next week, from Monday 12 October to Wednesday 14 October. The meeting will be held online using the Zoom platform, as we did for the IPTC Spring Meeting in May.

Over 30 IPTC member organisations will be represented, with more still finalising their attendance.

Presentations will range from Working Group updates and our 2020 Annual General Meeting to presentations from invited startups, discussions on IPTC participation in industry projects, and exciting presentations from members on relevant projects within their companies.

The IPTC Photo Metadata Conference 2020 is “co-located” with the IPTC Autumn Meeting – so we will be moving from the member meeting to the Photo Metadata Conference on the Tuesday afternoon.

Attendance is free for IPTC members. If you are not already registered, please go to the Members-Only event page to register.